Plastic recycling targets face supply, processing hurdles in the years ahead

National Harbor, Md. — Companies with sustainability goals centered around greatly expanding the use of recycled plastics are facing a one-two punch as deadlines draw closer.

A litany of recycled-content goals have been set by brand owners and packaging makers in recent years, with many tying their aspirations to 2025.

While that deadline once seemed comfortably distant, time is starting to run short to both capture more used plastics and create the additional reprocessing capacity to handle that material.

Looming sustainability goal deadlines were repeatedly mentioned during at the recent Plastics Recycling Conference in National Harbor, and Emily Friedman, recycled plastic senior market editor for consulting firm ICIS, gave her take on the situation.

"Over the next five years, well less than five years — less than three years at this point — we're going to need pretty much exponential growth in order to get us to meet these targets," she told the conference crowd.

"We decided we would look at two different pictures of what this supply-demand gap might be. One from a packaging perspective as a whole, the other is just PET and HDPE [high density polyethylene] bottles, since a lot of the commitments are coming from bottle manufacturers, beverage manufactures," Friedman explained.

For a general packaging simulation, ICIS looked at requirements needed to reach 15 percent recycled content by 2025 and 30 percent by 2030. Friedman explained the company settled on those target numbers by looking at legislative activity governing post-consumer resin use.

For a more-specific look at PET and HDPE bottles, ICIS took into consideration broader considerations.

"On the bottle side of things, we took it a little more aggressive, again, trying to model the consumer brand companies and their commitments, so 25 percent by 2025, 50 percent by 2030," she explained.

To meet the 15 and 30 percent recycled content scenarios for the broader packaging category, ICIS estimates the United States needs at least another 145 new mechanical recycling plants to achieve a 15 percent recycled content rate in packaging by 2025. Looking at the situation from a different financial perspective, the nation also would need a 46 percent compounded annual growth rate to achieve 30 percent recycled content in packaging by 2030.

"If you look at a solid investment, that's like, what, 15 to 20 percent usually. So this is just really astronomical the amount of material that we're going to need to meet, again, just 15 and 30 percent," Friedman said.

And for the higher recycled-content goals for just PET and HDPE bottles, collection rates would have to reach at least 75 percent to meet that 2030 target, she said. "That's really high. Look at where we are right now."

Consumer brands and packaging makers are signaling their desire to dramatically increase recycled content to the market. But reprocessing capacity is not the only problem between today's reality and tomorrow's aspirations.

"Yes, there is a need for new capacity," she said. "But what's really tying us up, and I think we all agree, is the supply side of things, the feedstock into the market."

There just simply is not enough being collected to meet upcoming goals. The best performing resins when it comes to recycling, PET and HDPE, do not even reach a 30 percent recovery mark in the United States. Only about 9 percent of all plastics, in total, get recycled.

"Definitely in the collection side of things is where a lot of people are going to need to focus now," she said, especially in providing access to recycling through both governmental and private efforts.

"It's bigger than just informing customers. It's going to take all sides," Friedman said.